National Women’s Small Business Month is celebrated every October—recognizing all the female entrepreneurs and the millions they employ. A local business owner is standing out in a male-dominated space and is helping others save time and money.
Adriana Lacy knows what it’s like to be constantly busy. She runs her own consulting business, teaches at Brandeis University, and launched two apps to help small businesses and content creators.
“A lot of the clients that we have are very small and they definitely don’t have the staff or the resources to have a full communications team,” said Adriana Lacy, Cofounder and CEO of Adriana Lacy Consulting.
With a small team around herself, Lacy and her employees jumped into the AI world to help add more of what we all want---time and money. Her team created two apps---one, called Social Chime, helps with social media management.
“So with this app, not only can they manage their social media profiles, but they can also use AI to help them with caption writing AI to help them with generating images, to really just help them increase their workflow.”
With 4.9 billion people on social media, according to Forbes, businesses are searching for ways to make themselves stand out. Lacy explained how her app worked, including using the AI assistant button to write out a post and within seconds, a caption spits out. She said this helps drive traffic to a site, using minimal time and money. Her other app compiles data from multiple sources and issues daily reports.
“What I see with a lot of smaller business owners is they may never, you know, check their sales or their advertising on a daily basis, and they might just be losing out on money or on customers because they’re not staying ahead of this and being able to deliver them,” said Lacy.
Lacy says AI can help businesses make more informed decisions, but she’s also focused on the ethical use of AI and double-checking what it spits out.
“Even though it is, you know, machine-controlled machine outputs, these outputs were created by humans,” said Lacy. “So of course there’s always biases that are baked into these models that can disadvantage people.”
As a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, she hopes her influence can break some barriers in the field of AI.
“You look at some of the biggest AI companies right now, they’re all run by men,” said Lacy. “And I think it’s a really great time to have more women in the field really thinking and just providing more diverse perspectives.”
Lacy created the apps to serve as a lifeline for small businesses that can’t afford social media management tools that cost hundreds of dollars. Her Social Chime and Insight Analytics apps start at $33 a month.
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